


Patron

by kyrilu



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Abuse of Authority, Canon Compliant, Caretaking, Character Study, M/M, Manipulation, Murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-26
Updated: 2014-07-26
Packaged: 2018-02-10 12:04:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2024490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyrilu/pseuds/kyrilu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He sees these monsters at their lowest. He knows what to give them and what they fear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Patron

**Author's Note:**

> I don't think I'll ever get tired thinking of alternate ways of characterizing Matthew.
> 
> ([This fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2012895/chapters/4364277) is my final, formed position on my Matthew backstory, but it's just so fun to make up other scenarios.)

During his second month at the hospital, he finds himself sitting outside the cell of someone whom he has seen the media christen as an angel of death. Her hair frames her face in soft gray waves, and she carries a smell with her that is her own. The scent is not of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, but it’s the sterile scent of a medical hospital.

She sees him as one of her own. That is, the same profession.

She talks to Matthew about her former patients with a wry, warm smile. She used to move around from hospital to hospital and treat all sorts of people. People with unique conditions, or celebrities, or people who are unique within themselves. Sometimes she shares entertaining stories: about arguments that played out right in front of her, about jokes shared by fellow doctors, about the time that a patient’s dog ran amok in the hospital. Sometimes she shares heartwarming ones: about the time she ended up having to deliver a baby even though she isn’t an obstetrician, about the time when she saw an elderly patient embrace his estranged son.

She doesn’t say anything about the dead, the patients whose deaths she is indicted for. She only says briefly, _They were in pain_ , and leaves it at that.

Matthew doesn’t push her to tell him about the deaths. He simply sits there and listens to her stories.

“I have a son,” she tells him, then, with a hand on the bars. “He’s younger than you. Wants to be a doctor like me. Or, rather, like I was.”

She says, “You’re a sweet boy, although you’re at the bottom of the chain. Not licensed, are you?”

Matthew shakes his head. He is fresh out of a psychiatric facility himself, since Frederick Chilton hadn’t bothered to check his records. He had trained here at BSCHI, but it was simple orderly work, performing the tasks that he had watched others perform.

“You should get your license,” she says. “You could get out of morbid places like these. Get away from morbid people like me.” She gives him a self-deprecating look.

“You’re not morbid, ma’am,” he says. “It’s my job. I don’t want to leave. I like the company.”

This is true. There is a familiarity being among the mad and the wicked. He knows the sound of unhinged laughter during the night. He knows their sobs, and their screams, and their grasping attempts at sanity. He sees them writhe whenever the needles go into their veins.

And of course, he hears their stories. He plays lisping and competent and forgettable when he’s around the other BSCHI staff, when he’s around strangers. But he can move around them as if he belongs besides them in their cells.

The angel of death says, “You have a strange idea of company.”

Matthew shrugs, and says, “There’s nowhere else I would rather be.”

She shakes her head, but she tells him more about her son. The time when he skinned his knee when he five years old, and ran to her thinking that she could heal him miraculously, that she could put the skin and the blood back together. The time when he read over her shoulders while she read articles from medical journals. He tried to pronounce the words out loud, but kept tripping over them. The time when he announced to her that he was going to volunteer at the hospital, in the gift shop, because he wanted to be with her as much as he could.

“I was his hero,” she says, and Matthew hears what she’s not saying.

He gives her grape juice instead of the tap water that the hospital provides patients. He escorts her to the privacy room to see her lawyer, and makes sure that her restraints aren’t too tight. When he cuffs her, he puts a foldable comb into her palm, which she closes a fist over, surprised, but her hair is glossy and less tangled when her ex-husband and her son visit.

When the time for her trial comes, she suddenly crumples to the floor. Matthew is the first one to her body, fingers gently prying the ring from her left hand in a quick, hidden movement.

Her death is determined as the result of a mistake in her medication. Another orderly is blamed, and he is dutifully fired. It’s just an error. A murderer wiped off the face of the world before the law could get her.

Matthew has to deliver the news. He arrives at the courthouse without her, walking to the judge and whispering into her ear.

On his way to the exit, he passes by a boy. Brown eyed, dark haired, high school aged. He slips the ring into her son’s coat pocket.

 

* * *

 

He sees these monsters at their lowest. He knows what to give them and what they fear. When Chilton drugs Abel Gideon, high dosages upon high dosages, it is Matthew who manages to make out Gideon’s half-formed murmur. It’s his wife’s name.

There is a young man who waxes poetic about the women whose throats he had slashed. He tells Matthew cheerfully that it was a messy business because some survived. During nights, the man falls into pits of blackness, darkness, and cries uncontrollably. Matthew sits outside his cell with a flashlight, casting beams at the man’s forehead, at his hands, and he stops crying. Instead he docilely stares at the rays, rambling like a broken record, and when Matthew tells him, _Shh_ , he sleeps.

Once, he leaves a shank in a crevice of a patient’s cell. The patient kills his neighbor, lunging through the bars, and Matthew has to clean up the blood when it’s over. The neighbor was loud and foul-mouthed, didn’t let any of the other patients sleep, and Matthew had reasoned that it was better now than later.

There is a blond haired man that Matthew likes to sit with. They trade Bible references - he has a nice voice, and the verses he recites sound like songs - and he kisses Matthew in the shower room, leaving Matthew’s scrubs damp. _I’ll give you this, I’ll allow you this_ , Matthew thinks, and he returns the kiss, his fingers stroking out lines of soap bubbles across the patient’s back.

The blond man likes to watch Matthew’s routine. Matthew lets one of the patients, who is a compulsive kleptomaniac among other things, steal a coin out of his pocket. Matthew gives another patient a law book, because he’ll be going to trial soon. Matthew adds an extra tablet amongst a patient’s medication, so that he can sleep easier, dreamless. Matthew knows the twists and turns of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane’s hallways; he knows the twists and turns of every patient’s wants and diagnoses. All he does is listen, and watch, and know what to do by tracing their desires to the source.

“St. Nicholas,” the blond man calls him, with a crooked smile. They have a private moment in the therapy room, locked in, and Matthew feels the warm press of the man’s fingers on his waist. He touches Matthew’s stomach, and says that he wishes that they matched, that they could have the same tattoos.

One day, the blond man asks Matthew if he can help him escape.

Matthew says yes. He gives the man a copy of his cell’s keys, and he kisses him through the bars, and the next day, he’s gone.

Matthew gets inky black tattoos branded on his stomach and his back.

 

* * *

 

The next patient, the next patient, and the next patient. It’s what he focuses his dedication and concentration on. He makes them laugh, and cry, and sleep, and die. He gives them a place where they can be safe, and where he can watch the darkness that each and every one of them nurse inside of themselves. Fostering it and cradling it. Sometimes he nudges them to make it bigger. Sometimes he quenches it. Sometimes he plays with it, back and forth, back and forth, and the result is sweeter than the blond man’s psalms.

He never gives them as much as he gave the golden-haired man, but he gives them close enough.

Until Will Graham.

 

* * *

 

He doesn’t know why he goes this far for Will Graham.

There is a story about St. Nicholas and three clerks. The three clerks had wanted to stay for the night at a butcher’s house, but instead, the butcher had killed them. He had put the dead clerks in a barrel, and he had decided to turn their remains into meat pies to disguise the murder. But St. Nicholas had seen through the butcher’s crime. He brought the three clerks back to life.

Matthew Brown cannot bring anyone back to life. He can only do the opposite.

Maybe Will Graham reminds him of the blond man’s comparison. St. Nicholas, the saint of repentant thieves and archers and sailors and fishermen and the falsely accused. St. Nicholas, who is invoked for the practice of secret gift-giving.

Will Graham has nightmares. He sweats and pants, tosses and turns. Matthew sees him like this every night, and he wants. He imagines himself by Graham’s side. Graham knows how easy it is to emphasize, to look into the minds of monsters and know their desires.

So Matthew does what he does best.

He tries to give Will Graham what he wants. He finds the right opportunity to strip Hannibal Lecter bare, to force him at his lowest and worst moment. The Chesapeake Ripper on the cross.

Matthew falls, underneath Hannibal Lecter, underneath the cross. He tries to kick the bucket over for Graham.

He thinks that he’s dying. He feels the blood on his skin.

 _They were in pain_ , the angel of death had told him, and he remembers his patients and thinks, _They always are._

They are already dead. The angel of death in her grave, a place that she had craved for herself. The young man who needs the artificial light in the night to soothe his darkness. Abel Gideon, resigned to feigned grandiosity and a deep buried guilt. The man with golden hair who had escaped, but Matthew knows that he won’t be able to run from the madness for long. Will Graham, with his dark eyes and his fears and his dreams.

Matthew Brown cannot bring anyone back to life.

 


End file.
